On Shining and Staring / On Ruin

After five weeks, a green space opens inside me, like I’ve stepped into a clearing. All clearings I’ve known are metaphorical. I’ve never lived any place with a thicket or a tangle of woods, unless you count my mind. I believe that a thicket in the real forest, branches wild with obscured stars, possesses its own lucidity needless of solace.

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No Wine

Understandably, at first no one believes that I’ve quit. They’re used to my dramas of excess and bareness, and I am the kind of person who finds drama most satisfying when it unreels in the expansive theater of wine and night.

I have been writing this essay on drinking, on and off, for nearly two years. When I started it, I thought I had quit drinking forever — but then two months later I decided I had been too drastic. It’s true, my friends said: you’re drastic. Since then, I’ve quit and unquit at least seven times. And in the years between the start of drinking and the start of writing the essay, who knows how many times. In fact, as soon as I began drinking (eighteen) I thought immediately of quitting, so that my drunkenness has always carried inside it the seed of sobriety. As if clarity is implicit in the core of chaos, or as if the forest presupposes the fire.

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No Wine

“I am always tying up / and then deciding to depart,” Frank O’Hara says in “To the Harbormaster.” In the poem he is in love with the harbormaster. If I were in love with the harbormaster, I would probably not depart, no matter how acutely indifferent the harbormaster. I would stand raging upon the harbor a long time. But I am in love with drink, which is different.

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San Francisco

My first city matches the idea of itself perfectly, as does nothing else in the world besides wine. It is made of gasping hills and thousands of prickling lights. Here it makes sense to be fearless at any hour — dismissive of whichever undisclosed networks live in the bottomless dark.

Here I live with five people in a three-bedroom Edwardian in the ungentrified corner of the Mission (which, at this time, exists). One of us lives in the living room. One of us, me, lives in a room that is smaller than my present-day bathroom. We can’t figure out a system for dishes and are always losing vegetables to rot in the back of the fridge. Our kitchen table has a candle-shaped burn in the center and we place a new candle on top of it, surrounded by half-finished bottles of wine which blacken in low morning light. We can figure out our parties, which are haphazard epics, intuitively.

In the daytime I meet in a sixth-floor office in the Tenderloin with people who live on the streets with their families. I put them on the waiting list for the three-month family shelter, a waiting list that happens to be nine months long. I try then fail to solve their problems. After five the night is my own and I am responsible to nothing save my glorious visions. When I walk alone in the worst neighborhoods, my clients say hello. I am twenty-two and a girl on a two a.m. bicycle, and I have an ontological revelation: the city is not dangerous unless you believe that it is. What people call danger is actually their fear of the poor. Lacking this fear, I am free to go home alone from the Phonebooth drunk and awake.

It makes sense to me also to ride my bicycle drunk — though there is risk here, there is also sheer pleasure. The world is a seen between two unseens, says the Bhagavad Gita. The city is an unseen grid of chance, and I am alive.

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San Francisco

One night Annie* and I are at the Phonebooth drinking gin and tonics. In 2007 at the Phonebooth, you should not have three, and four is actually impossible. My honors thesis is due. I am not yet twenty-two. After one gin, the door to the world beyond worry cracks open. Past the door is the unparalleled clarity of night. We have three, and we decide that tonight we should have sex with Sam, which will liberate him. We run across Guerrero yelling that we’ll have sex with Sam. We run across Dolores and are hit by a car, which doesn’t stop. Annie calls Sam and tells him that my bone is poking out, which it is, at the elbow — but I can’t see it. They come and ask me to rate the pain on a scale of one to ten, which I will never feel able to do honestly. I assume they will have to amputate my arm, which is okay, because at least I’ll still be able to write. There is a seven-hour operation, an arm (still attached to me) hung up in an intricate contraption of gauze. When they ask me if there’s anyone I would like them to call, I say no, which means that the next day my boyfriend has to call my parents. My friends gather around the hospital bed and I make them each read a line from a poem. Briefly, I’ve had enough of night. I won’t read Murakami, because I will read only what believes in being sane. I will read DFW’s essays (at this point he’s alive).

I turn in a shitty honors thesis and graduate with honors. I won’t drink while on Vicodin, but on Vicodin one day an entire novel comes to me in a dream. It’s about mixed-race South Asians who live in a fictional country with a complex social hierarchy, and one of them is missing an arm and the other a foot, and it has a lot of slow, lyrical passages describing swimming. I write Annie and Sam an e-mail describing the plot of the novel, but later I can’t find it in my outbox, and neither of them remembers it.

I’ll never be able to straighten my arm all the way, but who notices that. I’m inconsolable about it for a while and then forget.

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No Wine

I don’t know if I have stepped into a clearing or not. But I know I won’t drink, though I wonder if you believe me.

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No Wine

I know — with undeniable strength, but without clarity — that wine relates to love. At least it relates to the root-straining love, the love made of anguished fibers: to unrequited love, which is named desire, which lives inside all love. At least a strain of it lives at the root.

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No Wine

It of course runs counter to the principles of living, that reaching within each day for a handful of night. And night wants more night, night is endless. Even blue eyes have the dark at the pupil, no matter how pale the eye. But that does not mean you should scoop and scoop the dark.

Still I admit that I have never truly loved anyone — not with root-straining love — who did not also love drink or love fragrant smoke. Or love, in whatever manner, the mirrored chambers of warping.

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No Wine

But I fear that intoxication is nothing. I fear they are hollow, the crooks of the night that I long for. In fact I am sure that they are.

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San Francisco

I am talking to my client, Teja. She is my age (twenty-three). She calls me, with respect, a “white lady.” I explain that I’m not white and she listens with narrowed eyes. She has an eight-year-old daughter, recently returned to her custody. She has come from work and is wearing a navy-blue skirt suit. I am wearing narrow jeans with a hole at the knee that smell of smoke from the Phonebooth. I am growing a lump at my nosering.

She tells me a story and I write it down to type up in my case notes. As I can see, she says, her eye has popped out from Grave’s disease, which she got when she was using meth. She is clean now. Her father, now dead, sold drugs all his life and told her she could do it too, as long as she kept a stable job and never used what she sold. She always observed the first condition and almost always the second as well. Then she got a job in the basement of a big medical corporation, the same one where I get my health care through work. Her job was to move around paper files — but not thin little files. These files were as thick as your leg. She pushed them on heavy carts which weighed more than a hundred pounds. Everyone else who had the job was a man. They worked in a huge basement lined with metal file cabinets. They had to push the carts of files down the rows. Now and then someone would turn a corner and find himself colliding with another cart.

The guys at work needed meth to stay awake, they said. She hadn’t sold it before but found somewhere to buy it. She sold it to them. It was windowless in there, sleepy. But they were awake. There is a bone-ache, trying to stay awake at work through the cold midday dusk and the weight of the building above you. She took it too.

She lost her place and her daughter. She has her daughter back now and makes $1,300 a month. Market rent for an apartment is $1,000. They won’t let her keep her daughter if she’s living on the street. They don’t know that she is, but she is.

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San Francisco

Two blocks from work — stepping over police tape and human shit — there is a “new soul food” restaurant, where we go at five for tiny jalapeno corn muffins with brown butter and organic beer from Marin. It is an ecstatic space where we laugh at the ridiculous sublime and feel good that we are coworkers. Then I leave the gold of the glass and get on my bike on Market. The air has chilled and dimmed. Market is a wind tunnel scarred by gleaming, thin Muni tracks. Lights are waking in the buildings, a stand-in for family, a warm and reclusive amber.

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No Wine

This is why I believe in intoxication — because it is true to say I believe in it, though I have given it up: drunk, none of us is any better than any other. When drunk we are not trying to be great. When drunk we are fine with the abject instead. I like the way that everyone turns for now toward the abject, as if it is a home.

I love the moment when someone asks if we would like another drink, and we all look at each other and say yes. It’s as if we’d been strangers waiting for the bus together, sluggish, half-despairing, and then, in this moment, the bus has come. It’s cold outside and the bus is heated, and we smile at each other and are on our way home.

I like best the most decrepit bus stops in the city. I like it best when I don’t know the ones waiting there and when I don’t know when the bus will approach. Then it does, its number on the front clarifying your glee in the dark.

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No Wine

I love drunkenness, despite and because of its capacities for wretchedness. Whenever I meet the drunkenness I see that I will have to turn away — that I will one day have to walk up the green hill into life. I promise myself that I will — noting that I like to traverse this wasteland first.

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Austin, Texas

I am too exhausted by the redundancy of longing to tell you about the next city. At first I could not understand that it was a city — it was made of nights of sprawling and heat, of yards that tended toward wilderness, of soft old-time music in a house without air conditioning where a tiny dog seemed to live alone, of jars of wine on porches, of wide streets. I had never lived outside of the Bay Area and could not imagine what it meant to be somewhere else. I turned twenty-four. I was in a relationship with one person in the old city but fell in love with another, in the new. The other and I bought cheap beer and sat on overturned trash cans, the first night. He had a broken toe but biked the four miles to my house anyway, the first night I lived in the city. For the first three nights I had no furniture and slept on a blanket under the window unit — etc.

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No Wine

I like drink as a philosophical exercise, as a rejection of achievement and its cruel grounding in social hierarchy. This is not a practical exercise but I don’t find it an inappropriate one either.

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Palo Alto, California

In my own years of fragrant smoke once I was kissing a girl who like me was half Indian and we sat somewhere on the grass. It was bright outside and we read aloud poems about flowers. The bareness stood where it wanted or nowhere at all. I almost remember us as in a garden. The eyes break what they want to invent. We were not in a garden but instead stoned among flowers. I only wanted to read and write about drugs, and, barring that, take them. But I never took any drugs except the same fragrant smoke, and now I eye drugs with suspicion. It is not fair to say this, because right now I am wild upon coffee, speaking from inside a haze of coffee. And why I love sobriety as idea: it is the thought of speaking with this haze absent. It would be just bare speech, bare being. I wonder what that is like, looking straight at the grain of being.

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No Wine

I have come to the coffee shop so that I might feel the right degree alone. The air has not broken free of the prickling of morning. Who is too exposed to the window. I want the whistling in the cool air. I like that the town is insistent and green. Eyes burn as stars in the head if you notice.

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Athens, Georgia

All celebrate failure in the republic of drunks. I want to belong to this republic spiritually — but not actually. At least I don’t want its actuality right now. At other times, and perhaps one of these times was yesterday, I believe that the republic of drunkenness is the real world. All of my friends are writers, which means more or less that it appears strange to me to leave the republic of drunkenness; at times it seems absolutely insane. We are moving to a house in the neighborhood where our friends live; we are purchasing it quite unfairly, with money we did not earn, as if we are poets of the 19th century who subsist on the generosity of benefactors. In early June the yard fills with undeciphered insistence of fireflies.

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Athens, Georgia

I am going to get this tattoo, from Chris Marker: Tant que la misère existe, vous n’êtes pas riche[1]. A friend suggests that perhaps I shouldn’t do it: that I should think carefully before imprinting self-hating words forever on my body. In a world of rampant poverty, she says, whoever can find riches should feel love and gratitude.

I am near thirty and it seems to me I have outgrown self-hatred. But one of the last times I drink, I yell at this friend in front of everyone about how she’s “bourgeois.” This time, it turns out, I am not only drunk, I am clinically manic. In a couple months my mother will make me a gift of the down payment on a house.

Soon afterward I return to “myself” and find that my friend has forgiven me. Everyone deserves a house, she tells me.

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Athens, Georgia

Drinking wine is like being alone with ideas. It is summer and I am feeling that I like my ideas, and so I want to be alone with them for real. I want to be left to wander their corridors. But also, I have tried this already and it has led to despair. What can be done with a writer who can’t even be left alone in the corridors of her own ideas? I saw that my ideas would not make a house. It was a blow, but my ideas are the other kind. The kind that are closer to drunkenness, the kind that are not close to a house.

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No Wine

Life with a sip of what is hollow. That is an idea I like. I like the intermediate space between a house and nothing.

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Athens, Georgia

Last night, drunk, I fell asleep at eight p.m. Before the evening had even pressed at the edge of blueness. I woke at three a.m. for a midnight breakfast of ginger tea and toast and two small, local hardboiled eggs. Then I made a mistake: I found that I had tried to steep the teabag in cool water. I heated the water again and I made ginger tea. And I then drank cool water, so much.

I like the texture of experience when I am drunk. I like being best when it is slung slightly over the shoulder.

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From Confessions of an English Opium Eater

When I first looked at my notebook where I saw this passage copied down in my handwriting, I was alarmed because I thought I had written it. I was relieved to see I hadn’t, but the greatest embarrassment is that I thought it even for a moment:

“My life has been, on the whole, the life of a philosopher; from my birth I was made an intellectual creature: and intellectual in the highest sense: my pursuits and pleasures have been, even from my school-boy days. If opium-eating be a sensual pleasure, and if I am bound to confess that I have indulged in it to an excess, not yet recorded of any other man, it is no less true, that I have struggled against this fascinating enthrallment with a religious zeal, and have, at length, accomplished what I never yet heard attributed to any other man — have untwisted almost to its final links, the accursed chain which fettered me.”

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About Thomas De Quincey

From the introduction. “He was entirely incapable of dealing with money, of observing times and dates, of tidiness, because he was not prepared to waste thought on matters such as those, which did not touch his inner life.”

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From Confessions of an English Opium Eater

“The pleasure given by wine is always mounting, and tending to a crisis.”

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No Wine

This essay has taken so long to write because I have mostly been interested in it when I want to be free of drunkenness. When I want to live inside drunkenness, the essay appears tedious.

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Athens, Georgia

Last night once I was drunk I dreamed of some place in the sprawling Southern country. It was the landscape of wet and green and green. It was the song I like, the archetype of a song with a drone in its center. In the dream I fought with my mother, who felt betrayed by my way of living. And I had a conversation with someone, but I couldn’t remember if this took place in the dream or just before that, in the pit of a real moment, drunk: I asked a friend whether she liked an essay I’d written. At first she said yes automatically. After that she said: I don’t know.

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No Wine

I want to write things that might elicit the response: why so much romance? Why do you need to romanticize death? It seems plain, though, that any romance contains a scrap of death. You with your own brutal eyes.

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Austin, Texas

I am twenty-five, but I am not really any age. There is a succession of undocumented brutal hours punctuated by joyous nights, and there is a body that endures. Twenty-six is like this too.

Twenty-seven is different only in that I no longer have a fellowship to write. Relieved and disappointed, I get a job.

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Athens, Georgia

You have to change your narrative, my best friend tells me, fatigued by my shame.

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Austin, Texas

Twenty-seven, I get a job, which is to single-handedly manage the housing stability of 80 HIV-positive people, all of whom are homeless or far behind on their rent, some of whom are in the advanced stages of AIDS, some of whom are newly diagnosed, half of whom are queer, some of whom are transgender, some of whom speak only Spanish, half of whom are single parents, eighty percent of whom are disabled and thus don’t go to work. Few of whom are white. Almost all for whom this program can do almost nothing, because no housing exists in this city either.

I keep intricate paper records that could be audited at any minute, causing the program to lose its funding if I do something wrong. My clients call me, frantic: have I found them a house? No, I tell them, but could they bring me a new copy of their disability income letter?

One of my clients has no phone and falls out of touch. He’s probably in jail, my coworkers tell me. But I drive to East Austin to look for him in the barbershop on MLK and Chicón. I walk into the barbershop, and everyone looks up in concert, startled at this pale overgrown girl in a pink thrift store dress. I have grown slightly unrecognizable to myself, my hair longish and my face complex with early wrinkles, but in this barbershop my attributes clarify: I am not a man and not black.

Everyone is kind, but they haven’t seen my client in a couple months. He might be in jail, they say. I’m not allowed to say I’m his case manager, because it’s a breach of confidentiality to tell them he has one. I give my name and ask them to say I stopped by, as if I’m just a woman who is looking for him.

“Be careful,” someone tells me as I leave. Walking four blocks to the place I’ve parked, I run into another of my clients, a man, who asks me what I’m doing here. “Looking for someone,” I say. He offers me a ride to my car, which I decline. “Be careful,” he calls after me.

My coworkers think it’s funny that my degrees are in writing and not social work. “Did you want to be a writer?” one of them asks.

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From Confessions of an English Opium Eater

“The opium-eater loses none of his moral sensibilities, or aspirations: he wishes and longs, as earnestly as ever, to realize what he believes possible, and feels to be exacted by duty; but his intellectual apprehension of what is possible infinitely outruns his power, not of execution only, but even of power to attempt.”

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Golden City, Missouri

This is a waning agricultural town of 765 people, and everyone is white, and in the winter the land too is white — unbelievable, dead but gleaming in a purity touched with blue. The highways are straight, thin lines to other dead towns and on some days they turn to ice. Strangely, I live here, and perhaps more strangely, one night here I go to jail. It is one a.m. I am twenty-eight and driving drunk in a forty-five minute straight line that leads to the sad handful of streets named home. Driving from Kansas, where I teach “global issues” from a left-leaning textbook to wary nineteen-year-olds raised on farms. I am speeding, distracted because I am listening to the BBC on full blast as I slip past fields of buried wheat. Journalists with exquisite and varied accents of empire are discussing whether or not a journalist should be willing to die for her work. I like how their questioning fall upon my ears — earnest, thoughtful, sonorous. The journalists turn away from their topic to touch upon an impending wine shortage. One of them is a woman from India or Pakistan: Muslim, an abstainer. “I know you find it hard to believe,” she laughs, “but some of us really can live without wine.” Eventually I notice that red and blue lights have been following me, blazing quietly, for miles.

I pull over carefully and answer yes, I’ve been drinking a little. I try to walk in a straight line and stand on one foot. I fail a breathalyzer test and let myself be handcuffed.

I am dressed up for work that day — heels, long skirt, thin scarf. I have light skin and an Irish last name. After fingerprints, I have to put on orange clothes and am not free to go, but I am allowed to spend the night in the interrogation room instead of in the cell with the other criminals. “You don’t look like someone who should be in jail,” the warden says apologetically, and I am too scared to point out his mistake.

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No Wine

I was coming to the mouth of the river with a cup for lyric again and again and I grew bored and frantic. The open space in the lyric is like the door to intoxication, which I once loved: to wander some space in the deep interior. The doors inside a person are endless. I have opened those doors again and again. I have rubbed myself toward senselessness. I have opened into a lyric again and again of my own want. I thought this was enough: my own want, bare and private. Each person has this center inside. I wanted to drink the cold water of solitude again and again. I thought there was a genius to the mind alone.

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No Wine

I love Rumi’s poems about drinking best, and I love them especially because I believe that Rumi never tasted drink — because wine, in mystic Islam, was forbidden to everyone, even the poets. Thus wine in Rumi is only wine as archetype: as the luminous ether of dismantling, as the door to night.

Within writing, evocation by longing is the same as actual possession, or so the desire-drunk posit: the substance of wine exists in the utterance that codes longing for wine. Maybe, then, no one knows wine better than I do right now.

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No Wine

One sober night at Hendershot’s. July night, slow watch of stars and the machines in the street.

Will the subject of my life ever be anything but this: writing, not writing, drinking, not drinking? The subject of my life is tautological — it is to be the grain of my life itself. Speaking to a friend about granularity, about eating candied ginger. She is a friend who doesn’t like to drink — who will take or leave, and mostly leave, its slow and languid poison — and because of this I asked her to drink with me my last glass of good wine. I don’t know if I ever learned to tell what good wine was. I had thirty years to do so. I could tell which wine I loved, which was almost all of it. I will keep loving it, but from afar. I will find another use for the craving for burn and bitterness. Or will I stop loving bitterness altogether? But it seems impossible not to love it — sad not to — in a world edged by night.

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No Wine

Is this a Bildungsroman? I have bought a house and learned German. I will be married in two months. The tree that smears itself against all our living room windows — thin and dry in winter so we can see the town — has greened again and revealed itself to be a Chinese Snowball: huge knots of white blossoms. The town is everywhere lit with blossoms. One hulking tree is lilac-hung, but I learn later that it’s wisteria. I refuse to believe in property, and I believe in marriage perhaps even less. But I am also an American, an immigrant’s daughter: I cling to stories of progress even knowing they’re always half-lies.

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No Wine

It is the red wine I love passionately: how precisely it embodies my dream of wine. It transfixes, the way it harbors its obscurity, as if it is made to be filmed in black and white — so that it might become that black we intuit as more than black, that assertion that nuance lives even in the regions where dark accumulates most.

[1] “As long as poverty exists, you are not rich.”
*All names have been changed.

Shamala Gallagher was born in San Jose, California, to a South Indian mother and Irish-American father. Her essays and poems have appeared in Black Warrior Review, The Missouri Review, Verse Daily, VOLT, Copper Nickel, Waxwing, and elsewhere.